Chapter XX.—Absurd Representations of the Gods.

If the absurdity of their theology were confined to
saying that the gods were created, and owed their constitution to water,
since I have demonstrated that nothing is made which is not also liable
to dissolution, I might proceed to the remaining charges. But, on the
one hand, they have described their bodily forms: speaking of Hercules,
for instance, as a god in the shape of a dragon coiled up; of others
as hundred-handed; of the daughter of Zeus, whom he begat of his mother
Rhea; or of Demeter, as having two eyes in the natural order, and two in
her forehead, and the face of an animal on the back part of her neck,
and as having also horns, so that Rhea, frightened at her monster of a
child, fled from her, and did not give her the breast (θηλή),
whence mystically she is called Athêlâ, but commonly
Phersephoné and Koré, though she is not the same as
Athênâ,762 who is called Koré from the pupil of
the eye;—and, on the other hand, they have described their
admirable763 achievements, as they deem them:
how Kronos, for instance, mutilated his father, and hurled him down from
his chariot, and how he murdered his children, and swallowed the males
of them; and how Zeus bound his father, and cast him down to Tartarus,
as did Ouranos also to his sons, and fought with the Titans for the
government; and how he persecuted his mother Rhea when she refused to
wed him, and, she becoming a she-dragon, and he himself being changed
into a dragon, bound her with what is called the Herculean knot, and
accomplished his purpose, of which fact the rod of Hermes is a symbol;
and again, how he violated his daughter Phersephoné, in this case
also assuming the form of a dragon, and became the father of Dionysus. In
face of narrations like these, I must say at least this much, What that
is becoming or useful is there in such a history, that we must believe
Kronos, Zeus, Koré, and the rest, to be gods? Is it the descriptions
of their bodies? Why, what man of judgment and reflection will believe
that a viper was begotten by a god (thus Orpheus:—

or who will admit that Phanes himself,
being a first-born god (for he it was that was produced from the egg),
has the body or shape of a dragon, or was swallowed by Zeus, that Zeus
might be too large to be contained? For if they differ in no respect
from the lowest brutes (since it is evident that the Deity must differ
from the things of earth and those that are derived from matter), they
are not gods. How, then, I ask, can we approach them as suppliants,
when their origin resembles that of cattle, and they themselves have
the form of brutes, and are ugly to behold?